Ethnic Cleansing: Some Common Reactions
by Ran HaCohen
Dissident Voice
January 13, 2003
My previous
column – "Ethnic
Cleansing: Past, Present and Future" – attracted more reactions than
any other. Some of them were supportive and encouraging, for which I am
grateful. Many were outraged and even offensive, for which I am even more
grateful: not just for enriching my English vocabulary in certain semantic
fields (I have been called everything from "anti-Semitic renegade" to
"stupid dump ass"), but for reassuring me that I am not wasting my
time writing for those who agree with me anyway.
Almost all the
fire was aimed at my claim regarding the ethnic cleansing carried out by Israel
in 1948. These copious reactions reaffirm my argument that this is still a
taboo in pro-Israeli discourse. Even when protesting the present
"quiet" ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories or warning of
future Israeli intentions is tolerated, saying that Israel owes its existence
as a Jewish State to ethnic cleansing is evidently beyond the pale. As I said,
fighting the present strangulation of the Palestinians should be the top
priority of any peace activity on the ground; but on the level of
consciousness, coming to terms with the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is an
inevitable precondition for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.
In spite of the
heated tone of many reactions, not many of them were seriously argumentative.
Several readers want me to stop criticising Israel and to focus on Palestinian
terrorism instead. I get this advice regularly, as if Palestinian terrorism
were a never-heard-of scoop just waiting for me to discover. Sorry, friends: I
am convinced that stopping the occupation, the colonisation and the
dispossession of the Palestinians is the only way to end both the justified
Palestinian resistance and its unjustifiable terrorist actions. Pointing a
finger at the Palestinians may serve the Israeli propaganda, the settlements
and the gigantic American aid to Israel; but all these make my life in Tel-Aviv
neither safer nor more moral.
One reader
claims that I "imply that the Palestinian Arabs who fled or were driven
out […] are in the same boat as the Jews of Nazi Germany were". I did not
imply that at all. The expulsion of the Palestinians took place within what can
be termed a civil war (a war crime), whereas Hitler’s war on the Jews was an
unprovoked genocide of defenceless civil populations (a crime against
humanity). I used the Nazi case just to show that the way from mass-deportation
to mass-murder is a dangerously short one, and that every Jew, including those
calling for "transfer", should be aware of that.
Another reader
claimed that Palestinian nationalism was quite young, and that there was no
Palestinian people prior to the twentieth century. Though this is true –
Palestinian nationalism is even younger than the relatively young Jewish
nationalism (a.k.a. Zionism), and is to some extent a reaction to it – I fail
to see why this justifies an ethnic cleansing. Are human rights applicable to
nationalists only?
Pavlovian
Reaction
One issue,
however, was repeated in many reactions: the so-called ethnic cleansing of Jews
from the Arab countries. This seems to be the Pavlovian pro-Israeli reply
whenever the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is mentioned. It can be traced back to
official Israeli State propaganda as early as the 1950s. I say Pavlovian,
because it is invoked instinctively and irrationally, just like the saliva of
Pavlov’s dog.
The argument of
my article was that Israel carried out an ethnic cleansing in 1948, and that it
may be prone to repeat it. As a reply, I am told that the Arab countries
carried out an ethnic cleansing. What does this have to do with my argument?
The assertion that Arab countries may be guilty of a similar crime does not
make Israel’s crime any better; it definitely does not disprove that Israel is
prone to repeat it. Again, the rhetorical trick here is the same as asking me
to talk about Palestinian terrorism: whenever Israel is criticised, simply
change the subject and talk about Arab or Palestinian faults instead (luckily
for Israel, there are always enough of them). This is demagoguery, not a fair
debate.
However,
irrelevant as it is to the argument of my previous column, the analogy between
the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and the exodus of Jews from Arab
countries is worth relating to in its own right.
'Arab Ethnic Cleansing'?
First let us
recall the chronology. The ethnic cleansing of 600.000 to 720.000 Palestinians
from Israel preceded the Jewish exodus from Arab countries. The exodus of some
125.000 Iraqi Jews to Israel started in 1949; that of about 165.000 North-African
Jews took place as late as 1955-1957. It is therefore somewhat awkward to claim
that Israel had deported its Arabs because of the exodus of Arab Jews that
occurred years later. There is no doubt, however, that the establishment of the
State of Israel played a major role in the deplorable deterioration of living
conditions for Jews in many Arab countries.
Whereas Jews had
been living in the Arab and Muslim world for more than a millennium, for better
and for worse but under generally more favourable terms than under Christianity
(and with nothing even slightly comparable to the atrocities of the Crusaders
or the Holocaust), Israel’s ethnic cleansing coincided with the Jewish State’s
birth. And not by chance: the 600.000 Jews living in Palestine in 1948 could
not have achieved a solid majority in the areas they occupied without getting
rid of a similar number of Arabs. Unlike the Arab countries, that can show a
long tradition of coexistence with Jews (notwithstanding discrimination
though), and for which getting rid of the Jews had no demographic significance
whatsoever, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was both historically and
demographically the constitutive event of the Jewish State.
Moreover: even
though Jews were indeed harassed (by the people and/or regimes) in Arab
countries following the 1948 war, blaming the Arabs of ethnic cleansing is
shamefully cynical when it is imputed by the very Zionists who demanded
"let my people go", or by the same Israel that did all it could to
force those very countries to let their Jews leave. The global Zionist pressure
on each and every country, from the Soviet Union to Syria, to let its Jewish
citizens go, was part of Israel’s efforts to consolidate its Jewish majority;
that is why Israel always urged Western countries not to let those Jewish
immigrants in, lest they fail to make Aliya.
So oriental Jews
were pushed out of Arab countries as a result of the conflict with Israel, and
at the same time pulled by Israel, to consolidate its Jewish majority, and by Zionism,
that regarded the Jewish state as the only proper place for Jews to live in. It
is a major case of hypocrisy to compare those Jewish immigrants to Palestinians
who fled or were driven out of Israel to other countries during a war, people
for whom Palestine was their only homeland and who found themselves against
their will as refugees in foreign and hostile Arab states, people who were
willing but not allowed to return home, and whose property was dispossessed by
Israel.
Furthermore,
this hypocrisy is symptomatic of the way the Israeli establishment treated the
oriental Jewish immigrants. They were lured to come to Israel by promises of
equality and welfare. They were zionistically indoctrinated to see Israel as
their new homeland, in spite of their systematic discrimination compared to
Jewish immigrants from European countries. Those who refused this zionisation
were outcasts; those who did become Zionist and consider themselves as people
returning home from a long exile, now have to take the insult of being
described as foreign refugees, just like Palestinians in Kuwait.
The cynicism of
the Israeli establishment reached its highest peak when Israel raised the claim
that the property of the Palestinian refugees, confiscated by Israel after
1948, was "balanced" by Jewish property left behind in Arab
countries. This is a further development of the same manipulative analogy, in
which the oriental immigrants are assigned the role of wretched pawns. The
masses of oriental Jews, who lost their home and property as a direct result of
the establishment of Israel, and then came to Israel and were housed here in
poor slums hired to them by the State, never got any compensation for their
lost property; Now they hear that the State that they see as their homeland
considers them to be mere refugees, and that their lost property is bargained
off by this State against some Palestinian property it confiscated, of which
they themselves have not seen a cent.
The State of
Israel produces a lot of propaganda which is refuted by the slightest critical
analysis. The analogy drawn between the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and the
Jews from Arab countries is an especially repulsive example of this. It reveals
not only how absurd Israel’s propaganda can be, but how humiliating, scornful
and dangerous it is for many Israelis. A State that has been unable to grant
its own citizens a day of peace in more than 50 years cannot be expected to
treat them any better in its propaganda. Supporting Israel’s propaganda and war
machines is definitely not the right way to help both peoples of
Israel/Palestine to peaceful coexistence.
Ran HaCohen teaches in Tel-Aviv University's Department of Comparative
Literature, and is currently working on his PhD thesis. He also works as a
literary translator (from German, English and Dutch), and as a literary critic
for the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronoth. HaCohen’s semi-regular “Letter
from Israel” column can be found at AntiWar.com, where this article first appeared.